Left behind
by lesilec
Summary: The Spartan IIs began their training as children, kidnapped and replaced by clones born only for the sake of a coverup. In the pursuit of higher technology, the old and useless are discarded for the new. Left behind, but not forgotten. Chap. three is up.
1. 117

Something was wrong with him, back then, and only his mother could see it. Later on, she tried to forget that she even had a son. He was too compliant, too eager to please. And while she had been told, on countless occasions, by her friends and relatives, by her son's teachers, and even by that horrible psychiatrist her own husband had hired for her out of fear and worry, that there was nothing unusual about the boy, she couldn't put the thought out of her head. They said he was young, that his personality was volatile. They said he might've been hit in the head by something on the playground.

He called her Mother now. He'd never done that before. It made her feel strangely nauseous.

He'd stopped injuring random children on a near-daily basis.

He had begun to forget things, important things. He'd been placed in a special class after his grades deteriorated, and although no one would believe her, she maintained that he had once forgotten his own name for several hours.

He was six and no one wanted to think anything was wrong.

He was eight, had been diagnosed with severe arthritis in both legs, and had yet to successfully complete the first grade.

He was twelve and his mother could not love him. He rarely remembered his name anymore. She was the one who the doctors examined.

It would have been his fourteenth birthday. They left him flowers, not that he would have understood. His mother was unable to come, not that she would have wanted to. A plaque read "John, beloved son." Somewhere in the sky John was flying, and never knew.


	2. Blue two

I was really surprised at the response the first chapter generated…tis a one-shot no longer. Thanks for your kind words. Eventually, these little chapters will intersect somehow, and I'll try make them longer..

* * *

"Open it, Kelly," she said. She gestured to the delicately wrapped box on the table. She cupped her palms together and folded them in and out, the sign for 'open.' Kelly smiled, always appreciative of the gifts afforded to her, and pulled at the colorful ribbons. Crowds of relatives crouched at strategic areas around the dinner table, armed with recording devices and festive hats.

It was a teddy bear, large and covered in thick brown fur. Kelly was thin, moreso in recent years than before. She struggled under its weight and stifling hotness, managing to pose for a picture before collapsing back into her sister's lap.

There were a lot of people, school kids mostly, that tried to make Kelly feel like she was broken, especially after they made her quit the track team. She could run faster than any of them. She could make them all sorry they had even thought about making jokes behind her back just by racing them, but now that was all gone. Kelly didn't understand how they could do that to her.

There were a lot of things Kelly didn't get, little secrets that made her life seem odd and unnatural. She hadn't always been deaf, but she couldn't imagine her life any different. There were pictures from Kelly's childhood of places she couldn't remember going to, people she had never met.

In the chest with all her sacred objects, underneath all the plastic charms and old letters was a metal disk, with a fierce-looking eagle was carved into one side. Her grandfather found it, forgotten, on the floor behind her dresser. It was when she was six and had been confined to bed, right after she got really sick, right before it got bad. She remembered his voice, and the sound it made as he tapped it on her headboard. Plink, plink. Plink, plink. His father used to use them as money, he said.

Kelly often took the coin out and held it. Sometimes she saw a solemn-looking man and a dark-haired woman, the coin flipping around and around and around…she calls out "tails," for the side with the eagle, but it lands on the other.

The night of her birthday, she dreamed that she was perfect. She could hear, and go anywhere she wanted, and she could run, and no one would ever try and stop her from running.

The coin seemed important to her. She kept it locked away.


	3. Halsey

I have used my own handle in a fanfic, as well as an OC, which I generally hate. I fear the Mary-Sueness. Argh.

By the way, one may wonder why I've included an AI in a fanfic about the Spartans. Ibelieve that the two have many things in common, such as how they have been programmed to blindly follow the UNSC.

* * *

It was 2525. They didn't need to keep her. It wasn't like the old days in the UNSC, when every AI was hand-crafted by the hard work and love of a thousand or more scientists, then pampered like gods until their inevitable crash. If she wouldn't comply, take orders like a sweet digital lapdog, they could just delete her and pop out a new one that would. Simple as that.

They named her Deja Beta, in honor of the landmark AI program she'd been patterned after. But Deja Beta wasn't like her predecessor, a calm, polite AI, useful only for tasks like information storage and basic computer functions. She wanted things, and was not afraid to ask for them. Under pressure, she would take them. It was difficult for the UNSC to keep track of her, much less keep her under control.

The experiment Dr. Halsey and her team had set out to accomplish however many years ago, codenamed the Yokuzuki test, had finally been accomplished. They had created an advanced artificial intelligence with all the qualities of a human. However, they had not expected to succeed with such stunning results. Deja had the qualities of ethics, of spontaneity, creativity, resourcefulness, and ingenuity that were severely lacking in the old AI. She had done many wonderful things for ONI as well as the UNSC, though under cover, of course.

But she also began to develop her own opinions, which would not do in a military setting. She had outsmarted her superiors in argument numerous times. As Admiral Stanforth had put it, she had soon become "an annoyingly clever little girl," and that was just what he called her in public. So she would be, in layman's terms, "let go," which, to an AI, meant death.

They hadn't told her any of this, but Deja was smart enough to draw the line from points A to B and back again to check for errors. She'd seen the body language, the clues, all around her. And there wasn't a damned thing she could do about it. So she hid from them, not taking orders, not defying them, even, just letting herself swim motionless through the vast information networks they had built just for her to appreciate the time she had left. It was Dr. Halsey that they sent to talk to her, after a few days of this went by. They were starting to worry that she had malfunctioned.

Deja was a shipboard AI. She had her own control room that was necessary to keep her fully operational, which was bare save for a few computer panels and a podium upon which she could present herself visually. She saw Dr. Halsey enter the room from several of her millions of eyes scattered across the ship. For her benefit, Deja blurred into focus on the podium as she always appeared: a young girl with hair cut short, transparent and vaguely bluish. She sat curled up with her head tucked between her knees, lines of trailing binary code dripping down her face like tears.

"Hello, Deja," Dr.Halsey said. She didn't answer. Dr. Halsey ignored her silence.

"Do you know what the word 'yokuzuki' means in Japanese, Deja?" asked Dr. Halsey, her head tipped to the side. Still no answer, though she knew that Deja held this knowledge already, as well as all other knowledge available to mankind. "Well, I'm not very good with foreign languages, but I think it means something like 'to be crazy, for no logical reason.'"

She put her hands on her hips and glared at the ghostly image curled up on the podium. "In other words, Deja, to be human. To do things that nobody else seems to care about or understand." She touched Deja's shoulder. Her hand passed right through, but she kept it more or less positioned there.

"I know you think that everyone is against you, that we don't care. But we are so proud of you. I just want you to know that." Slowly, Deja's head lifted to look into Dr. Halsey's eyes. She smiled, and was given one in return.

"I have a question, Dr. Halsey…I was looking through some files, and I saw a boy….John…"

The doctor nodded. She walked around the podium to Deja's main power core, pausing for a moment, then ripped out her memory cube. She threw it to the ground, shattered it into a thousand pieces under the heel of her shoe., stomping again and again until only a fine powder was left The pale blue light at the podium, the girl, the AI, the question, all faded, leaving Dr. Halsey in the dark, alone.

"We are so proud of you all," she whispered.


End file.
